THE LAND OF I KNOW NOT WHAT AND I KNOW NOT WHERE

the government having a deaf security agent following every single
person everywhere they go. The agent cannot hear the content of
any interactions, but can otherwise observe every minute detail
of someone’s life: the time they wake up, how they drive to work,
who they talk to and for how long, and how their business is
doing, their health, the people they meet in the street, their social
activities, their political affiliations, the papers and specific articles
they read, and their reaction to those, the food in their shopping
basket, and whether they eat healthily, how well their marriage
is going, the extra-marital affairs, their dates and intimate rela-
tions. Since most of these interactions are today mediated at some
level by telecommunications services, or are facilitated by mobile
devices, all of this information will now reside with our internet
service providers, ready and waiting for government access.

At least in the West, we stand a fighting chance of resisting some
of the more draconian powers that various branches of government
are seeking to acquire over civil Internet activity.

Given the strength of the civil-liberties community in the West and
the KGB’s comprehensive surveillance of the Internet, one might
assume that Russia would represent an implacably hostile environment
for cyber criminals. Yet the Russian Federation has become one of the
great centres of global cybercrime. The strike rate of the police is
lamentable, while the number of those convicted barely reaches double
figures. The reason, while unspoken, is widely understood. Russian
cyber criminals are free to clone as many credit cards, hack as many
bank accounts and distribute as much spam as they wish, provided the
targets of these attacks are located in Western Europe and the United
States. A Russian hacker who started ripping off Russians would be
bundled into the back of an unmarked vehicle before you could say
KGB.

In exchange, of course, should the Russian state require the services
of a hacker for launching a crippling cyber attack on a perceived enemy,
then it is probably best for the hacker to cooperate.

2007 was the heyday of a loose organisation of companies based in
St Petersburg known as the Russian Business Network, or RBN. This
mysterious acronym offered to host websites for individuals and compa-
nies - it was known as the king of bulletproof hosters. Companies that